REMIX

In Part One of Lawrence Lessig’s Remix, he discusses two main key concepts: “Read/Only” culture (RO) and “Read/Write” culture (RW). RO culture is a less practiced in performance and more comfortable with simple consumption. Lessig connects this to the consumer, to consume the product and do nothing more with it. It is fueled by professionals. This provides a sort of hierarchical where we only become the readers and consumers and those creating the music or text are the elite. In RW, however, this reading does not suffice. We must add to the culture we read by creating and re-creating the culture around us, by remixing it.

Remix is an essential act of RW creativity. It is the expression of a freedom to take “the song of the day or the old songs” and create with them.

Lessig describes remix as a collage :

It comes from combining elements of RO culture.

There are two goods that remixes create: the good of the community and education. Remixes occur within a community of remixers; he gives the example of the community creating anime music videos (AMV). Remixes also

excite “interest-based learning” (Mimi Ito)

Lessig explains that this RW culture is not something new; on the contrary, it is something we have been doing for some time. A form of RW culture that is closest to our tradition is the remixing of text. As a matter of fact the blog I’m typing now is an example of this remixing of text. I utilized the internet to retrieve Lessig’s Remix and now I’m remixing it by recreating the text, adding my own thoughts and opinions. The internet is the place where all writing gets to be RW, where it encourages the ethic of democracy (opposed to hierarchical).

Lessig argues that one should not be more practiced than the other because even thought RW is more encouraging, we can’t re-create what is not created. However, he does say that RW has been practiced less and we should in turn try to balance both out  Currently, copyright laws favor one kind of culture over the other. It supports the practices of the RO culture and opposes practices of RW culture. In RO we have no legal permission beyond the permission to consume. However in RW, with the technological and digital advances, we have been given the opportunity to remix,

but “can” doesn’t imply  “may”.

If the copyright laws do not change and people continue and attempt to practice RW culture, the extension of the Web will continue to raise a number of copyright issues.You can see an example of the great amount of copyright reports on Google’s transparency report.

Google regularly receives requests from copyright owners and reporting organizations that represent them to remove search results that link to material that allegedly infringes copyrights. Each request names specific URLs to be removed, and we list the domain portions of URLs requested to be removed under specified domains.

In the week of September 17, 2012, it reported over 1,500,000 URLs requested to be removed from search. This also does not include requests for products other than Google Search, such as YouTube or Blogger, or requests submitted by means other than their web form, such as fax or written letter. This shows just how strict our copyright laws have become and who knows how many of these sites were written as remixes.

I agree with Lessig in saying that piracy is wrong and credit should be given to where it is due and that the laws current attitude toward RW should be reformed.  It has caused issue for many and even stopped many from practicing RW culture. It will completely affect the younger generations if we live in solely RO culture. We will become nothing more than consumers in a consumer world and creativity will be left to the elite.